I learn something new every day on this list, it seems. I'm probably still a youngin' compared to most of you (rolling over to 27 in about a month), and just started getting "serious" about photography late last year when I picked up a *ist-DL. Wonderful camera, only complaint of sorts is the lack of a hard protective cover over the LCD, such as found on the Nikon D70.
Anyways, in talking to my photography friends, most of which are my age or younger, I was always told to never leave the house without something capping the front element. Skylight and UV filters are handy universal protectors. Seemed like perfectly sound advice to me, considering I can't leave the bedroom without getting a spot on a white shirt. I can make it to the front door on a gray shirt. I will have somehow put a scratch in the screen of a new PDA within minutes of taking it out of the box. So yeah, not having some sort of protection on the front of something that has triple digits worth of investment in it does make me a bit uncomfortable. It hadn't occured to me that these filters might be degrading image quality, although it does make perfect sense now that I think about it. But considering that I'm still working on the kit lens, and $300 is a HECK of a lot of money for me to drop on another lens, am I really going to see that much of a difference between filter and no filter? I picked up a 3 pack of Quantaray filters (skylight 1A, polarizer, and UV). I tend to leave the skylight one attached to the lens. I've tried both with and without, and can't really see any real difference in quality, but then I've also been focusing more on learning the camera, than getting Ansel Adams level quality. Eric -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
